Christina Schmid
405 21st Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
In my work, I consider writing as a medium that grapples with linearity, temporality, and the space between text and reader. Originally trained in literary criticism, I appreciate texts not only as evidence of an author’s skill in communication, but as ideas taking form. The “˜texts’ I now consider are no longer confined to the realm of language: they have shifted to artifacts, assemblages, installations, paintings, performances, and still nameless forms of creative inquiry.
I think of my critical practice as a form of creative non-fiction. Unpredictable, arts writing, to me, is a sort of speculative prose designed to investigate and analyze what visual art can do, how and why it affects us, and in what ways the potential repercussions of aesthetic experiences matter. The act of meaning making that ideally occurs when writing “with“ art is an active encounter, the resulting text the trace of an interaction. I am inspired by writers who cross disciplinary boundaries, think outside the box, and thus make possible new insight and different ways of looking“”at art and at perception itself: Sara Ahmed, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton, to name but a few.
I am interested in probing and articulating the possibilities art harbors to change the way we look at the world, our place in it, and our relationships to one another.
Educational Background
- Magister philosophiae: American Studies, Karl Franzens Universitat, 1998 -
- PhD: English, University of Minnesota, 2005 -
Specialties
- Writing on the arts, creative nonfiction writing
- Contemporary art
- Visual culture
- Art and Visual/Material Culture of the United States
- Aesthetic theory
- Visual arts and art theory